Poet Karren LaLonde Alenier as author of The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas continues with her operatic proclivities as she launched her latest poetry collection The Anima of Paul Bowles in Los Angeles in 2016. Amy King saaid, Anima “makes a lyrical dive into the historical corpus of two major 2oth-century writer/artists.” More info: karren@alenier.com.

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Thursday, April 11, 2013

BPR LIT TRIP 11 with Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Forgive the
Steiny Road Poet as she makes her way along the road of the Birmingham
Poetry Review
volume 40 as paved by Ricardo Pau-Llosa in his poem “God-Is-Love Man.” The
Steiny Poet is not a Christian though she is married to man raised Baptist who
once held the Shroud of Turin in his hands (oy!) when he worked at the
National Geographic Society many decades ago.

What drew the Steiny Poet to this poem, besides the
assertion that this week she would look at poems dealing with love, is the rich language that
populates this free verse poem with a narrative thread. Phrases like breakfast hawks, a loving sun of a family person (could this be a polite variant of
the rude son of bitch?), flocking of
flakes on his lapel (in reference to the eating of an almond pastry) make
the Steiny Poet sit up straighter as she reads with pleasure.

The poem is
narrated by a man the Steiny Poet believes to be the God-Is-Love Man, who
takes issue with “the breakfast hawks, overdressed/ office types who never
figure time/ for making coffee and warming/buns, cleaning up, and being/ a
loving sun of a family person/ in the morning…/ when tempers were most likely/
to slash and swipe." GIL man might be an employee of the bakery. In any case, GIL man is a Christian who
values family, if not brotherly love.

While the Steiny Poet has figured out God is love comes from the New
Testament 1 John, Chapter 4,
verse 8—“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love”—and Pau-Llosa’s
reference to bread and shoes in the
closing lines of his poem—“Will the man, then,/ his number finally called, the
last/ almond pastry within his reach,/ settle for the timed quiet of a corner/
broken only by the flocking/ of flakes on his lapel, or will/ he accept the bread
and shoes of forgiveness”—comes from the New Testament Timothy 6 (and please don’t ask, Dear Reader which
version of the Bible since some of the versions make the line bread and
clothes)—“Since we entered the
world penniless and will leave it penniless, if we have bread on the
table and shoes on our feet, that’s enough,” the Steiny Poet will
merely point to the following powerful but sarcastically comic lines and say that “who might rise from
the desert” sounds Biblical and leave it at that:

And who might
rise from the desert

of the clean
table, and what face

might shape the
steam above the Styrofoam,

and what bug will
think the crumbs

on the floor of
the bakery a delivery

from God?

GIL man
wonders where God enters the picture relative to the breakfast hawk by taking
his observation down the Great Chain of being to a bug on the floor of the bakery.
Would even this bug think the dropped crumbs on the floor would be God given
and enough, let alone the man who is covered with flakes of the pastry that he
waited for impatiently. GIL man wonders if in the quiet moment of eating that
almond pastry if the breakfast hawk would reflect on scaling down what he accepts as
enough.

Having just
celebrated the holiday of Passover and sung the song “Dayenu,” which means “it
would have been enough for us” and deals with being grateful to God for the
gifts he gave the Jewish people, such as freeing them slavery, providing the teachings of Torah
and the Sabbath but saying any one of these gifts would have sufficient, the
Steiny Poet completely gets the message of Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s language rich poem which transcends its
particular religious references.

About the Poet

is author of seven collections of poetry, including Looking for Divine Transportation (The Bunny and the Crocodile Press), winner of the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature, and her latest, The Anima of Paul Bowles from MadHat Press. Her poetry and fiction have been published in such magazines as: the Mississippi Review, Jewish Currents, and Poet Lore. Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, her opera with composer William Banfield and Encompass New Opera Theatre artistic director Nancy Rhodes premiered at New York City’s Symphony Space Leonard Nimoy Thalia in June 2005. She writes a monthly column on opera for Scene4 Magazine at scene4.com.